ESPN Boss Declares eSports 'Not A Sport'

Paul Tassi
, ContributorNews and opinion about video games, technology and the internetOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Though the sports and video gaming communities see far more overlap than they used to, there's still that ever present "nerd vs. jock" rivalry that still rears up from time to time, even as the landscape of society has changed. That's what happened this week when
ESPN president John Skipper was asked about Amazon's recent Twitch acquisition, and the general rise of eSports.

"It’s not a sport -- it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition....Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports," he said, according to Re/code.

Most will recall that ESPN only just recently partnered with DOTA 2 to broadcast a preshow for The International on ESPN2, and aired the event itself on ESPN3, their streaming arm. It also seems like a rather hypocritical declaration for a channel that airs bass fishing and poker alongside "traditional sports" like baseball, football, basketball, etc.

The 2013 League of Legends World Championships in LA's Staples Center

When fans were first upset that ESPN wasn't airing the DOTA 2 championships on TV, I wrote a piece that said eSports didn't need ESPN, or really, TV broadcasting at all. To me, TV seems like a step backward for a scene that's far better to consume in online streaming format, rather than sliced and diced for TV time outs, and condensed for time given that many such tournaments take entire weekends to complete. The only real benefit to TV is the idea of being "accepted" as a real sport that deserves airtime alongside more traditional pastimes.

Now it seems we're getting into an old debate about the semantics between "sports" and "eSports," only this time it's a bigger deal because the president of ESPN (and by proxy, the "president of sports" essentially, in the west), has emphatically, and rather rudely, declared eSports not a "real sport."

You want to argue official definitions? I suppose we can for the hundredth time. The dictionary defines sports as:

By that definition which includes skill OR physical prowess (or both, presumably), I would say eSports qualifies. Games like Starcraft or DOTA require honed physical skills in addition to larger decision making processes. In other words, clicking fast and often and precisely is essential to victory. That's less the case in newer eSports like say, Hearthstone, which only requires strategy and no physical ability whatsoever, but still, by that definition it should qualify.

And yet, I understand that when you look over the general eSports pro line-up, you wouldn't look at many of the players and deem them "athletes" by their physical prowess alone. Though the same can be said of many other "activities" that are on the fuzzy edge of being a "sport" or not.

Personally, I don't really think it matters whether eSports is technically a sport, a competition, or a game. It's a competitive experience that people enjoy watching, and I don't see why it's necessary to draw specific lines for events like these. Should we cut off the "sports" tag at curling? Hunting? Poker? The Spelling Bee? I don't know, and again, I don't think it matters.

With that said, Skipper's remarks in this context are unnecessarily dismissive, particularly when his network had so recently partnered with DOTA. If ESPN was smart, instead of dismissing Twitch and eSports as no competition to them because it doesn't involve "real sports," they would be bending over backward trying to figure out how to capitalize on what is very clearly an explosive trend of millions of fans around the world watching people play video games. Whether that would take the form of more partnerships like the recent one with DOTA, or trying to do something more advanced like actually partnering with streamers or sponsoring events directly, it seems like they're waving away what could be a promising opportunity, and instead are essentially letting Twitch and Amazon have a monopoly in the space.

Right now ESPN is as relevant to me as the Oxygen Network, given that I spend my nights watching League and Hearthstone streams instead of three hour baseball games. But rather than dismissing my choice of a "competition" I enjoy watching, ESPN would be wise to try to understand and embrace it.